from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old English līn ("flax, linen, cloth"). For more information, see the entry "linen".

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle French ligner.

Examples

The senate, under reid, has drawn so many lines in the sand, it's beginning to look like a football field --- a new line every ten yards. harry is famous for saying things like, ���This is where we draw the line��� and when someone, anyone, challenges him, he runs and draws another line in the sand.

Nations and to the Cherokees, that notwithstanding the former of these nations had ceded the property in the lands to his Majesty, yet no settlements shall be made beyond that line, it is our duty to report to your Lordships our opinion, that it would on that account be highly improper to comply with the request of the memorial, _so far as it includes any lands beyond the said line_.

If, for example, you went half way up the side of a hill and, starting there, walked entirely around the hill, neither going up any higher nor down any lower, and you drew a line of the route you had followed, this line would be a _contour line_ and its projection on a horizontal plane (map) would be a _contour_.

There, clearly marked, was a line of footprints, _a single line_, with no breaks or imperfections, the plain record on the rain-soaked earth that one person, evidently a man, had passed this way, _going out_.

In the hospital, usu. means a central line, a kind of catheter placed into one of the main veins of the body draining into the heart. These are more complicated and hazardous to insert then a regular IV and are usually put in by physicians or nurse practitioners.

Contronymic in the sense of the rectilinear align and bee-line vs. 'lining' which is curviform, enclosing, e.g., cup-shaped or spherical depending on the object or countainer lined. Also: line as in devious; a dissimulation.